Multimedia Usability Project Meeting France

Contents

Wikimedia France and Wikimedia Foundation organized a multimedia-focused workshop that took place on November 6-8 2009 in Paris, France. Rather than an open community conference like Wikimania, this was a workshop targeting skilled practitioners who want to help transform our approach to rich media throughout the Wikimedia universe.

One of the key objectives of this meeting was to help inform the recently funded Multimedia Usability Project to improve the usability of Wikimedia Commons. This meeting should help to immerse the project team in the complex world of multimedia in Wikimedia projects today. It should also help to start building a core group of volunteers as well as chapter support for the project.

Beyond the Multimedia Usability Project, we're hoping that useful practical discussions would lead to outcomes positively driving approaches to sharing and collaborating multimedia in the Wikimedia universe forward.

A Technology track: This would include hammering out specs and code for key technological improvements deemed necessary for rich media in WMF projects in areas such as upload usability and workflow, search and tagging (including multilingual search), permissions workflow, deletion workflow, and so forth. It could also address next-generation technologies such as video editing tools, as well as operational issues associated with large scale content delivery.

A Content partnerships track: This would look at best practices, and could perhaps be used to hammer out a "content partnerships manual" for working with institutions as in the case of the German archive partnerships. It could also be used to prioritize partnership opportunities.

A Community practices track: Here we would discuss constructive ways for the Commons and local project communities to interact, existing deletion and arbitration practices, legal issues with different types of media, and other day-to-day issues that Commons community members deal with.